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-Welcome to the Seattle Art Museum.
We're in the galleries right now for Ai, Rebel:
The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei.
I'm standing in front of one of Ai Weiwei's most iconic works,
called Dropping the Han Dynasty Urn.
It is a triptych, that is to say, three images;
black and white photographs of him dropping a vase.
This is an ancient vase from the Han Dynasty.
And you see him letting go of it in the first one.
The second one almost as it's about to hit the floor.
And the last image is of it smashing to bits at the bottom.
He's against a gray wall,
and this image was taken by his younger brother Ai Dan
testing out, actually turns out, a new camera,
a Nikon F1, I believe,
which could take many shots per second.
So in some ways it was a spontaneous thing.
They were just playing around with a new camera, a new toy.
But on the other hand,
it's also an important aspect of Ai Weiwei's
longstanding practice
in really disrupting our notions of status quo.
And this image, and this act,
this performance was in -- cause a great stir.
It was very shocking for people at the time
because, after all, who destroys antiquities like this?
You keep them in museums,
and they are very valuable,
and they are also a relic representing the ancient past
of China, so the destruction was just shocking at the time.
In fact, we also know it was shocking because --
to Ai Weiwei himself,
because afterwards he writes in his memoir a little note
that tells us that they, he and his brother,
after smashing it,
actually took pains and took care to sweep up the shards
because he didn't want his mother to see this mess
that he had made.
I thought that was a very funny thing
that I had discovered in during this research.
The other thing that I never knew and also came out
when I was reading about this project
is that when I visited Ai Weiwei in his home in Portugal,
he had a Han Dynasty vase on one of his bookshelves.
So these are three black and white photographs,
but it turns out that the vase is green in color.
After so many decades, I never,
it never occurred to me to think about the color of the vase,
which is actually a deep green. -Ai, Rebel:
The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei
at Seattle Art Museum runs now through September 7th.
Reserve your ticket at seattleartmuseum.org.
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-Catch Art Zone Friday night’s at 8
and anytime online at SeattleChannel.org/ArtZone.
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Catch Jul!et live at the Fremont Abbey on Tuesday, April 29th,
and watch for her new single, "Battery" slated to drop in May.
And that's a wrap.
Big thanks to Roq La Rue Gallery and founder-owner
Kirsten Anderson for hosting us.
And a reminder that "Waterfalls",
"Let My Ghost Linger",
and "Consumption" are up through May 3rd.
And we're going to leave you
with a visual feast of the cherry blossom explosion
on the University of Washington campus.
Now, it's a short season for cherry blossoms,
about two weeks, but those two weeks are glorious.
So enjoy, and we'll see you soon.